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This one sure brings back nice memories! My old Keene 5" dredge parked on lower Stetson Creek on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska in 1979. The first of many years dredging on this creek and on Cooper Creek, which Stetson feeds into. This was one of my more pleasant summers of dredging. The weather was nice, the water was low, the gold was good. This location was giving up about an ounce a day, better than the average on Stetson Creek. Mainly because of plentiful shallow bedrock. The gold is almost all on bedrock in Stetson Creek with little or nothing in the overburden. The more overburden you process, the less gold you get overall as a rule. This is because Stetson Creek is a classic gulch deposit, a very steep creek with waterfall after waterfall. Mother nature's giant sluice box, and the gold has been well settled and concentrated. The paystreaks were small and very well defined, move over just a foot and it was like crossing a line, you were in the gold and now you are out. There were large stretches of creek with smooth bedrock and so little gold you would think there was none in the creek if you got into one of those sections. The gold was nice - lots of jewelry gold buy nothing really big. The two pennyweight nugget in the photo was about as large as I ever found in years of mining, though the records report a three ounce nugget having been found on the creek. Must of been a fluke from what I saw, if it even happened at all.

Alaska is trying to make as much information as possible available to prospectors on the internet. The latest offering is an interactive map index for state Division of Geological & Geophysical Survey (DGGS) maps and US Geological Survey (USGS) maps. It allows searches of the database by geographic area of interest, keywords, publishing agency, dates, etc. Results of a search provides a list of free, downloadable maps. The current database status (a work in progress): Maps published by the Division of Geological & Geophysical Surveys (DGGS) Percent of DGGS maps uploaded by theme: Geology 96% Geophysics 95% Hazards 98% Other 25% Resources 85% Maps published by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Percent of USGS maps uploaded by theme: Geology 65% Geophysics 25% Hazards 50% Other 12% Resources 25% Check it out here - http://maps.dggs.alaska.gov/mapindex/